CSV with a UTF-8 BOM and semicolons

Handle it in code

Each snippet below was run against this exact file with Python 3.14.4 and Node 24.15.0 when this page was built, and the output shown is what it printed.

Python

European Excel exports use semicolons and often a BOM. The utf-8-sig codec drops the BOM, and the Sniffer finds the delimiter instead of assuming a comma.

import csv

with open("bom-and-semicolons.csv", newline="", encoding="utf-8-sig") as f:
    dialect = csv.Sniffer().sniff(f.read(4096), delimiters=",;\t")
    f.seek(0)
    rows = list(csv.reader(f, dialect))

print("delimiter:", repr(dialect.delimiter))
print("header:", rows[0])

Run against this file, it prints: delimiter: ';' header: ['id', 'name', 'betrag', 'datum']